Mike Florio of NBC’s ProFootballTalk reported this week that Manti Te’o’s sexuality has been “the proverbial elephant in the room” at the league’s Scouting Combine in Indianapolis.

“It’s just that they (NFL team officials) want to know what they’re getting,” Florio said on the Dan Patrick radio show. “They want to know what issues they may be dealing with down the road. We just assumed that at some point there would be an openly gay player in an NFL locker room and the team would have to work with the realities and make sure that everything is fine.”

Weeks ago, in a follow-up curve while discussing Te’o’s dead fake girlfriend, Katie Couric asked the Notre Dame linebacker if he were gay. “No, far from it. Faaar from it,” he responded, and in a decent world that would have been the end of the discussion until and if Te’o chose to continue it.

But decency long ago got chewed up and spat out. NFL scouts and executives don’t even have to employ Couric’s bluntness while questioning prospective employees.

They can, as Colorado tight end Nick Kasa discovered, flitter around the elephant by posing questions that would seem perfectly normal banter between red-blooded men if the conversation were being held at the neighborhood Olive Garden and not during a quasi job interview.

“They ask you like, ‘Do you have a girlfriend?’ Are you married?’ Do you like girls?’ ” Kasa told ESPN Radio Denver. “Those kinds of things, and you know it was just kind of weird. But they would ask you with a straight face, and it’s a pretty weird experience altogether.”

Do you like girls? Why not just ask when the player last went to a strip club? Or what he thinks of Dorothy in the Wiz? NFL executives might be a lot of things, but they’re not dense. Just as Hollywood shrugged for decades at Jodie Foster’s open secret, the sports world also has its own. There have been and currently are gay players in the league, and somehow it continues to thrive.

It’s ludicrous and flat-out offensive that any employer can inquire about sexual preference, but it’s not necessarily illegal. Currently there are no across-the-board federal protections regarding employment discrimination based on one’s sexual orientation. In 30 states—including Indiana, where these particular interviews were held—a job applicant can be queried about sexual orientation and possibly not hired because of it.

Given what we continue to learn about concussions and brain damage, it seems acceptable for the NFL to probe around—literally—the heads of its players. If some semblance of an equal playing field is to be attained, invasive blood tests supersede any privacy issues. But how deep is the league allowed to rummage inside a player’s personal life?

In most any other world, it would have been deplorable for a prospective employer to ask an applicant if his mother were a prostitute, which is what Dez Bryant said happened to him three years ago during the NFL’s pre-draft screening. There is a fine line between character evaluation and character assassination.

“For whom did you vote?” “Do you believe in God?” “How many children do you have, how many women have you impregnated and how do you support them financially and/or emotionally?”

Are those acceptable questions? They revolve around issues that theoretically could divide any social set, especially when chemistry and bonding play such a vital role.

Back in 2006, a poll commissioned by Sports Illustrated revealed that 56.9 NFL respondents would openly welcome a gay teammate. And marvel at how the culture has progressed since then. Once most of us got our heads out of the sand, we looked around and realized we had gay friends and neighbors and family members, and the earth shockingly kept revolving. It’s so passé to be homophobic, as Chris Culliver most recently learned.

Gay baiting is now considered especially vile, to the point where the NFL will fine or at least chastise players who cross that ignorant line. But who’s monitoring those who should know better? Roger Goodell runs his empire with a particular choosy sword, and for the moment it’s up to him to decide if and how sexual orientation fits under the umbrella of job requirements. Goodell’s openly gay brother might have some thoughts on that.

Or maybe it will take the courts to stop the nonsense and codify federally what 20 states and the District of Columbia have already determined: employer discrimination, both public and private, based on sexual orientation is against the law.

Thirteen of the league’s 32 franchises are thus prohibited from discriminating because of one’s sexual orientation, though labor experts say any team could have legally asked players if they were gay as long as the conversation occurred in Indiana, or any of the other states where inquisitive, invasive questions about a person’s sexual life aren’t protected.

In Te’o’s case, he blamed his awful performance in the Combine on exhaustion and mental stress. Between his lumbering times this week, the dreadful Alabama game and his mishandling of the fake girlfriend hoax, his ability to handle pressure is disconcerting. Those are legitimate red flags. Where once he was considered a sure first-round draft pick, he could tumble to later rounds and nobody would blink.

He could also theoretically claim that his stock fell because of the badgering he took from scouts and executives from certain teams, or suggest they tried to sabotage him by spreading rumors. He’s already said his piece, and shame on anyone who tries to cleverly pressure him or any other player into discussing their private sex lives.

Goodell needs to get a handle on this before the damage is irreparable.